Ignis
by The Laughing Phoenix
Summary: There is more than one Stark legacy. Part two of And for Life's sake.


Ignis

Summary: There is more than one Stark legacy.

Part two of And for Life's sake.

* * *

Only if pressed would Tony admit that he hadn't remotely understood what he was getting into with the Oath.

At the time he'd been a snot-nosed kid, just thirteen. It was summer break and as a result he was back in the Stark household. Maria had made noises about sending him to visit 'his school friends', but nothing came of it and he wasn't surprised. He was already halfway through high school and due to start at college in a couple of years – but as impressive as it sounded, it didn't lend itself well to making friends.

Howard was away on a business trip, Maria absorbed in her charities, and Jarvis was busy running the house. Tony was more or less on his own, which was fine by him; he wasn't a baby and could entertain himself after all. It was just that he'd finished his homework already, and he wasn't allowed in Howard's workshop anyway without supervision, and even if he could sneak in Howard would know and Tony really didn't feel like being yelled at. Again.

Without anything else to do, Tony decided to wander around the basement. The building was huge, far bigger than a three-person family needed, and the basement took up the entire footprint. Some of it was in use – a wine cellar, the workroom where Howard and Jarvis stored the supplies necessary to keeping the cars and household appliances running. A whitewashed concrete space where the boilers and furnaces necessary to heat the pile clustered together like a little grove of metal tree trunks. Most of it was storage. Poorly organized, vaguely labeled boxes stacked together without attention to context, but it was sufficiently chronological to make a guess at what was where.

Moderately curious to see how far back the boxes dated, Tony picked his way through the mess towards the back wall, only just visible in the gloom. Periodically he'd take down a box and open it, poking through it absentmindedly before putting it to the side and continuing on. Stretching up to take a box labeled _1943_ from its spot on the top of a stack, Tony yelped as something slid from beneath the lid and smacked him in the head.

Shoving the box back into place, he turned to see what had hit him. It was a book – paper-back, dog-eared and stained with oil, _Manual_ printed across the front in fading black ink. "Manual to what?" Tony muttered, picking it up and flipping it open.

A lot of shit, it appeared. Tony paged through sections on philosophy and what looked like some weird 'psychic' stuff. The section on electronics appeared interesting enough, and a few points gave him some ideas, but it looked like a fantasy book someone had been reading and tossed into the pile. Not Howard, God knew he thought fantasy was a waste of time, but he'd been working with the SSR during the war, hadn't he? Maybe one of the lab techs left it behind by mistake and it had somehow ended up in the pile of junk.

Paging through, Tony came to a section that elaborated on different worlds and how to travel between them via worldgates. The descriptions of other worlds absorbed Tony for a good hour, and from what he knew of physics the theory behind the worldgates seemed accurate. "Could be worth trying the equations," Tony muttered, numbers and theories beginning to buzz in the back of his mind.

Flipping back through the pages, he stopped on one that was blank except for a single block of text. An oath of some sort. Laughing a little, Tony leaned back against a trunk, reading it aloud. _"In Life's name, and for Life's sake, I say that I will use the Art for nothing but the service of that Life. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so – till Universe's end."_ Chuckling at the oath - Tony knew perfectly well that he didn't live in a world where anyone gave a shit about anything the oath had described - he closed the book and tucked it under his arm, turning and heading back toward the stairs.

"_It's annoying, is what it is._" Tony paused at the bottom of the stairs, and turned to stare at the boilers. "_How's a fella supposed to get anything done when his screws are loose and the bolts never fit right?_"

"_Ah, shut yer bellyaching,_" said someone else, and Tony edged closer. "_Listen to ya, bitch bitch moan moan moan. Yer just pissy 'cause the old man said he was gonna have you replaced if ya broke again._"

"Hello?" Tony called. "Anyone there?"

"_Nobody here but us tin pots,_" jeered the second voice. "_Well, 'cept for Lewwhee there, he's gen-you-ine pig iron!_"

"_Aww, thanks, tin can, didn't know you cared!_" snapped a third voice, and Tony grinned despite himself. The oath, the _Oath_ no longer made him laugh. A strange delight filled him from toes to nose instead.

"It's real," he breathed. "Holy crap, it's all real." He eyed the manual with some apprehension, then clutched it to himself and tore up the stairs to his room. He had studying to do.

The next three days were some of the wildest of Tony's life. He spent them trotting all over the house, listening to the various machines as they went about their business. An entire afternoon was spent sitting in front of the old Ford Roadster in the garage, fixing a sticky valve with the car's help and enjoying the multitude of tales she had for him.

"_There's a jam somewhere in there, but I don't know exactly which it is,_" Susan told him. "_Howard was going to take a look, but then he went off for that meeting in Williamsburg and, well, you know what he's like. As like to replace the whole engine as to repair it, and where's the point in that when it's a simple fix?_"

"No problem," Tony said, already digging in his pocket for a piece of chalk. Flipping open his Manual, he found a spell that claimed to work as limited-range radar or sonar within the defined boundaries of the spell, returning a detailed map. "It okay if I use this to see if I can find it?"

"_Of course, dear,_" Susan said. "_I must say, it's nice to have a wizard in the house. I haven't seen one in decades._"

Tony ran his eyes down the spell's instructions. The main requirement seemed to be lots of whatever medium the spell was written in, be it chalk dust, ink, or graphite. Propping it to the side, he quickly and carefully sketched it out, using the concrete under Susan's engine block. "This shouldn't feel like much," Tony told her, crawling back out from under the car. Sitting up, he pulled his Manual into his lap and read the spell slowly.

The lines of chalk dust shifted out of the written Speech and into a diagram. Susan made a chuffing noise. "_Tickles a bit,_" she said, "_did you find what you were looking for?_"

"I think so," Tony said. "I'm gonna need to get under the hood and check to be sure though."

"_Go right ahead, darling._" Susan said. "_And while you work, I can tell you about the first wizard I met, back in the '40s._" Susan was wickedly funny, a keen observer and talented mimic, and she had Tony in stitches.

In the end, Jarvis called Tony for dinner. "I've gotta go, sorry," Tony said, scrambling up off the floor, stowing tools in a handy box. "I'll be back later?"

"_Take your time, darling._" Susan said, "_I'll be here. I've got plenty more stories – I didn't even get to the one about the admiral, the beagle, and the box of oranges._"

Tony meant to go see Susan the next morning, he did, but an idea hit him while he was brushing his teeth and he found himself scrambling into clothes and racing for Howard's lab. Okay, he wasn't supposed to be in there but he'd had an idea for some materials in the engine he was building and who better to consult than the machines that worked with them on a regular basis? Bypassing the locks on the doors with practiced ease, Tony hustled to a back corner, ducking past half-completed projects and large machinery.

"Hey, guys," he called as he approached the machines he was looking for. "I had this idea, just wanted to check a few things, and – " an electric cord he hadn't noticed caught his ankle, and Tony fell, unable to stop the heavy box as it fell on top of him. Everything went black.

Tony blinked awake on a cold concrete floor, head cushioned by his manual. The room slowly swam into view, assembling piece by piece – a wall on his right, a metal handrail on his left, the steep drop on the other side, cavernous space beyond. Slowly sitting upright, Tony rubbed his head, staring out at the largest room he'd ever seen. Stretching away from him were machines he'd never seen before, sitting on a dozen different levels, stretching up up up into the glare of the lights and down away into the depths. They worked madly away in eerie silence, moving items from one point to another, seemingly never the same route twice, blue light shimmering across wires and down poles.

It looked like some sort of weird factory, and Tony wondered if he'd fallen through a worldgate of some description or made one by mistake and wound up in an alien's processing plant. Maybe there was a planet where this scale and this architecture made perfect sense, and Tony almost hoped he'd find someone willing to talk to him about it, because how _wicked_ would that be?

Hauling himself upright, Tony scooped up his manual and began to walk along the balcony. Sure, maybe a foreman would come by and yell at him for being somewhere he wasn't supposed to, but until then he could explore. Pacing along, he admired the sheer scale and intricacy of the machines, the way a press fed whatever they were processing into one of a dozen conveyer belts or buckets according to some arcane pattern he couldn't identify. The way pulley systems strung together along walls and between pinnacles like elaborate nets or webs.

A creaky whisper startled Tony into turning around. Sitting on the catwalk behind him was a robot unlike any he'd seen before. It was perhaps knee high – a low-slung squat cylindrical body with four long spindly arms and a small domed sensor array in the center of the top – and looked oddly like a spider. The two watched each other in silence for a moment.

"Hey," Tony said. "How're you?" The sound of his spoken voice startled even himself, and the little robot reeled backward. "No, wait, I'm not gonna hurt you!" It froze, watching him nervously, and Tony crouched. "Just wanted to say hi is all. I'm Tony, what's your name?"

The robot considered him a moment longer, then two of the arms shot straight up and latched onto the balcony railing and it threw itself up, over the railing, and out into open space. Tony scrambled upright and watched as it latched onto a gigantic piston, then scaled up the side and beyond Tony's sight, the faint noise it made quickly swallowed up in the greater silence.

"Huh. That was weird," Shrugging, Tony turned and resumed his walk along the balcony, taking in the space, the echoing sound of his steps once again the only noise.

Then, the longer he looked, the more components Tony began to recognize. Here was the jointed arm he had built for an assembly robot. There was a motor he'd retrofitted. Strange organizations of belts and pulleys resolved themselves into schematics he knew and understood. As he walked, more components revealed themselves, along with metal staircases up and down, leading to catwalks that stretched off and away into the maze of machinery. It made no sense, some of the things in here he'd never shown anyone, so how would an alien know? He supposed that the aliens might have had similar desires to his, meant to do similar things, but without the same historical engineering background how the hell would they come up with something identical?

Tony had been wandering for just long enough to get used to the silence when a low moan of distressed metal reached his ears. Spinning, he managed to pinpoint an Archimedes screw as it broke away from its supports and slowly toppled down into the bowels of the building, crashing against things on its way down. With a groan, a robotic arm several pillars away followed, flailing madly as it fell and sparking blue.

"What the hell?" Tony asked, hands clenching around the railing. A pulley system started to collapse, cable after cable going taut and snapping, the backlash knocking into machines around them, and Tony jumped the railing, landing on a catwalk below and sprinting closer.

Grabbing onto the iron railing, he watched the last of the cable snap, and fall away. "That's strange," he muttered. "That shouldn't break like that." Only he wasn't certain what 'that' was anymore, and Tony found himself looking at his hands, trying to remember what the metal they were wrapped around was called. I-something, and he rather thought the number twenty-six was important somehow only that was the number of letters in the alphabet wasn't it? Frowning, Tony looked up and caught sight of his reflection staring back from a curved surface of ruddy metal polished to a shine, and realized he couldn't remember what _that_ metal was called either.

"No…" Tony breathed softly, realizing now just what was escaping him. The table, the, the periodic table, that was it, he'd had it memorized since he was just a kid and now it was _gone_. Panicking, Tony looked around at the machines, at the rivets starting to strain and the boilers starting to grumble and the poles starting to buckle or list, and did the only thing he could think of.

Half-balanced on the railing, Tony pulled up the spell he'd used the week before to repair a broken valve in Susan's engine and _shouted_ the strings of Speech. Poles straightened, rivets eased, and the pulleys began slowly reconnecting themselves, cable joining, the metal thickening and smoothing again as the breaks fused and healed. One by one the elements of the periodic table surfaced again in Tony's mind, gold silver and copper clinking back into place like coins, illuminated by the burn of phosphorus reflecting off of liquid mercury behind them. The Swedish quarry elements tumbled across the rapidly filling table to the sound of pebbles rattling away, and finally all settled back into place, brand-new bright and shiny unnilennium at the very end.

Shaking, Tony leaned against the railing. He'd done it, he'd brought it back, fixed the pulley system and retrieved knowledge he'd thought lost. A dry sob ripped from his throat as he began to realize exactly what that meant.

He wasn't in some weird sort of factory after all. Or maybe he was, but not one anyone on Earth could claim to be familiar with. He was inside his own mind, and the machines, the machines were _him_, his thought processes and ideas and dreams and desires and it was crumbling away around the edges.

Forcing himself away from the railing Tony rushed back the way he'd come, planning spells and patches he could use to fix the damage and hoping he'd remember what the fallen parts had looked like. Only it seemed to be too late, because he could hear more things beginning to break outside the range of his sight, above and below and around corners and how was he supposed to fix what he didn't know was broken?

Tony managed to patch maybe a dozen parts and flat-out replaced five more, rushing back and forth, flipping madly through his manual and trying not to panic at the increasing destruction unfolding around him, the groans of straining joints and the screams of metal parts breaking and snapping and tearing away. One of them, a lift just big enough to hold a small child, took half of the universal constants he'd memorized with it, and Tony nearly botched the spell twice, panicking that he could no longer remember the speed of light or the acceleration due to gravity on Earth. It finally healed, the metal shimmering blue as it repaired itself, and he gave a huge, shuddering sigh of relief.

The sigh was followed by another, then another, and then Tony was huddled against a railing and heaving great sobbing breaths, trying and failing to force down the terror in his chest and throat. He didn't know what he was doing, what he was missing, what was breaking or gone and he supposed he wouldn't know, would he? If his hypothesis held and this was his mind, if something went missing or was put back together wrong how would he know, since the damage would take that knowledge with it?

A clattering sound directly in front of him had him looking back up. The robot from before was back - or maybe another one that looked just like it - and Tony had the sense that it was _eyeing_ him somehow.

Somehow, impossibly, the company manners Maria and Howard had drilled into Tony came to the fore. "Hi," Tony said to it, pushing upright. "Sorry, I didn't get your name."

The robot made a shrugging motion, then walked away from Tony. After a few steps, it stopped and beckoned him forward with one long arm.

Tony scrambled upright and followed. He didn't know exactly what it was, or what it was doing in his head, but at this point he was simply glad someone else was there, even if it was just a figment of his imagination.

The robot led him along the catwalks to a pair of pistons, then hopped the railing to land on one. "I don't think I can do that," Tony told it.

It shrugged again, then turned its attention to the barrel's seams, which Tony noticed were straining. A tool disjointed out from one of the arms and did something Tony couldn't quite see, then it scampered up a bit more and repeated the motion. The joins it left behind were repaired, and Tony thought he knew what it wanted him to do. Turning his attention to the other piston, he paged through his manual for the appropriate spells, then drew them out and said them, his piston mending as he went.

The robot turned to examine his work, then bobbed what Tony thought was an encouraging nod before it swung away to another piece of machinery, expecting him to follow. Tony trotted obediently along behind it, joining in with its repairs as he went.

He wasn't entirely sure how long he'd been working with the robot or how far they'd gone when he heard a massive crashing noise from behind them. Spinning around, he watched, horrors-truck, as one piece of machinery after another crashed away from its supports, dropping into the depths.

"_Well, I think that went quite nicely,_" the robot said, in a smooth baritone.

"Nicely?" Tony squeaked.

"_Of course,_" the robot said. "_Quite a pretty cascading system failure there, I think it took part of your facial perception with it. Not quite prosopagnosia, not yet, but we're not all that far off._"

Tony stared at it for a moment, uncomprehending, then a horrible realization dawned and he threw himself backwards, scrambling to get away. "I know what you are," he choked. "You're _It_, aren't you, the Lonely One."

"_Lone only, Anthony, never lonely. How could I be, with so many beings working for me?_"

Tony goggled for a moment, then turned and ran. "I need a plan," he muttered to himself as he clattered down steps and along catwalks. "Need a plan, need a plan. Holy crap, I've got that thing in my head…"

His manual banged against his side as he ran, and Tony scrabbled to open it, collapsing against a wall, and flipping through it again, hoping something new would have come up. It kept falling open to the simple spells he'd used before, the ones that were just fine for repairing a busted valve or worn gasket but were useless on this kind of scale.

"I need more time," Tony muttered to himself as he searched frantically. "And I need a way to stop the L..._It_ before it does any more damage." Two of the pages stuck together, and he scrambled to separate them. The Mason's word looked up at him, and he stared at it for a minute. "Maybe? Damn it, I don't have enough time!"

Another crashing noise had Tony's head snapping up, and he ended up having to dodge sideways to escape the snapped pulley cable as it lashed out at his section of walkway. It missed him, but on the backswing it wrapped around another cable, snarling it. The sudden tension hauled the cable out of alignment, and the next thing Tony knew an entire pulley system was snapping and groaning along the wall and out of sight, like the world's most demented game of cat's cradle.

"I don't even know how to fix that," Tony breathed. He'd been managing so far, but knots had never been his strong point, and he was pretty sure that the wheels dropping down, down into the depths had been important.

"Okay, okay, can't fix it, so...what, replace it?" he muttered to himself. "I don't even know what most of these _do_." He paced back and forth, rubbing at the back of his head. "What would Dad do?" he asked himself.

Tony didn't like to think about his relationship with Howard too closely, but the man was the best engineer in the world for a reason. He tried to call up a mental image of Howard on the rare times he and Tony worked in the same lab… but when he tried to picture Howard's face, he came up short. He could see everything else, the machines, the blackboard covered in chalk dust and messily-scrawled equations, even the blueprint for the 5th avenue mansion's renovation, but couldn't make out Howard's features, his eyes, his nose, his stupid moustache, none of it.

"Hold up," Tony muttered, straightening, mind fixed on the blueprint tacked on the wall of his memory. Other schematics bloomed in front of his mind's eye, everything from a car's engine to a missile's layered shells to a plane's fuselage.

"That's it!" he shouted, jerking upright. Turning, he ran along the walkways, searching for a large, open space. Luck was with him - two turns and a staircase later he found himself standing on a large platform, ten feet by ten. Dropping to his knees, Tony reached into his pocket for the pencil he'd absent-mindedly shoved in it that morning.

Working fast, he sketched out the spell he'd used on Susan to find the problem valve, changing the parameters to define the mile plus of space around him instead of just a few cubic feet. Graphite on concrete was tricky, but before long the spell was complete, shining bluish-grey against the pale grey of the platform. Sitting back on his heels, Tony spoke the spell.

The energy required to map something of this magnitude pulled him out of himself and into the spell for a bit, but when he returned to himself it was to see a delicate 3-dimensional structure hanging in the air in front of him. Carbon's tendency to lattices appeared to be working in his favor. Easing forward, hesitant to touch the map for fear he'd shatter it, Tony examined the work.

"Alright," he muttered to himself. "Let's get to work." Carefully poking through the map, Tony began to make edits, redirecting piping and minimizing the complicated pulley systems in favor of conveyer belts and robotic arms. Where there were broken or missing components, he recreated them using graphite dust hurriedly ground from his pencil, linking bits and pieces as well as he could. As he worked, he heard the periodic whines of metal fatigue and the crashing of bits of machinery as they broke away.

Once, he thought he heard a skittering noise of metal claws on metal, but fought down the urge to turn and look. Finally, he put his pencil down and stared at the map. It was as complete as he could make it. "Right," he turned and picked up his Manual, flipping through to the spell he wanted. "Time to apply this and hope I haven't screwed it up somewhere."

His Manual was in a cooperative mood, it seemed, and fell open almost immediately to the pertinent page. Tony read it one more time, making sure he understood what he was doing. This spell acted as a weaker version of the Book of Night With Moon - unlike simply reading from the Book, which carried the definitions of everything and could and would restore them if the words in it were spoken aloud, this took a wizard's diagram or map of a place and applied it to the defined area. It had been intended as a way to divert natural disasters, such as an avalanche or tsunami or pyroclastic flow, by altering the geography just enough to send the worst of it away from vulnerable locations. This was a little different.

Tony looked up at his diagram once more to make sure everything was where he wanted it, then looked back down at his Manual and began to read. He was barely two words in when the spell caught him up, and he was no longer reading it so much as it was speaking him. When he blinked back to himself, it was to see his diagram growing in size as it sped away, the graphite flashing blue-grey as it spun out to settle into forms on the machinery around him. As it landed, it pulled the machinery into place along with it, a ripple of construction expanding out from around Tony.

An angry clicking noise came from the far side of the platform as the robot form of the Lone Power pulled itself over the edge.

"Hi," Tony said to It. "I don't think we did the proper introductions. Fairest and fallen, greeting and defiance, isn't it?"

"_You think you've won,_" It sneered.

"Actually, I have won."

"_And when the spell ends? When you are forced to regain consciousness - and believe me child, you will be forced from here or you will die - and I remain?_" It spidered closer to him, and Tony pushed down the urge to flinch.

"I've got a plan for that. Because the thing is? You won't be here."

"_You will never be rid of me,_" It said, "_I am too deeply ingrained in your very being._" It swung sideways. "_Another Stark legacy._"

"I don't care," Tony snarled. "You're in my head, and you're not welcome!" He spoke the Mason's word, and the concrete dropped away below It in a square, sending It careening down into a pit. Working quickly, Tony pulled the concrete up and over, capping it off.

"_You really think this is going to work, Anthony?_" It called. "_Concrete is impermanent, it will grind down. I have the time._"

"You're assuming," Tony muttered to himself, "that it will stay concrete." Flipping through his Manual, he found the transmutation spell he wanted. Reading it over, he gulped. For what he was trying to do, unaided, the price would be astronomical. This was _really_ going to hurt.

Taking a deep breath, he set the Manual down on the concrete next to him and knelt in front of the pit's cap. Picking up a piece of debris, he slit the palm of his hand and used the blood welling up to draw the characters of the spell across the concrete. He kneed along the ground as he went, nearly stumbling once as he put his knee down on a pointy chip and it shifted under him, but kept his balance.

Once the ring of speech was complete, Tony took one last look at his Manual, drew a long breath, and pressed his hands to the surface. He began to recite the spell, and as before the strength of the working caught him up, until he had no idea where he was or what he was saying, but was incapable of stopping.

At last, he was done. Panting heavily, Tony looked up, and where there had once been an irregular concrete cap sat a perfect half-sphere of adamantium. He knew that were he to clear the rest of the platform away, the mirror half would be revealed, caging the Lone Power behind its foot-thick walls. "Guess it worked," he gasped, then slid sideways to the floor. He briefly felt himself hit the concrete, then knew no more.

When Tony awoke, his head was pounding and his ribs and shoulder felt distinctly stomped on, but he was too relieved to care much. Well, no, that was a lie. It hurt and the pain was making him queasy. On the other hand, he was awake and in full possession of his faculties, and somebody had put him in his own bed, so there was probably a limit to the amount of complaining he could do.

He'd been awake for a while, staring at the ceiling and contemplating the relative benefits of going back to sleep versus getting up for some water to wash the sour taste out of his mouth, when the door opened and Jarvis poked his head in. "How do you feel, Master Anthony?" he asked, coming over to the bed.

"Like I'm dying of thirst," Tony told him, and reached eagerly for the glass of water Jarvis proffered with a smile.

"You gave us quite a scare, young man."

"Didn't mean to," Tony objected.

Jarvis straightened the bedclothes. "You finish that water and I'll go ring the doctor. You've been unconscious for at least four hours. Your father's here, he'll want to see you too."

The doctor showed up and poked and prodded at Tony for a bit, pronounced him "bruised, but no bones broken," and left again, leaving behind a prescription for painkillers and strict instructions not to overexert himself. Jarvis took the instruction seriously and instructed Tony to stay in bed, then further informed him he wasn't to get out of bed for another day at least.

Howard didn't come in until later that evening. "What do you have to say for yourself?" he demanded, shutting the door behind him.

"I, what?"

"What were you doing in my lab?"

"I had an idea I wanted to try," Tony said defensively.

"Oh, an idea." Howard sneered.

"Well, yeah, I thought I had a way to improve stress resistance in the pistons of an engine by changing up the ratio of tungsten in the steel!" Tony snapped, hands clenching in the blankets. "I just wanted to test it!"

"Goddamnit Anthony!" Howard shouted. "I left the G7 summit early because I got a call from Jarvis that you'd been poking around in my lab and gotten yourself knocked out. How many times do I have to tell you to stay out of there?" He drew a long breath. "You know what? I don't care. Since you're obviously incapable of listening to me, I'm locking the lab and you can spend the rest of your summer in the house on Martha's Vineyard, where you can't get into so much trouble."

"WHAT?" Tony jackknifed upright, wincing a little at the sharp pain in his head. "That's not fair, there's nothing to do out there."

"Well maybe you should have thought of that before you went poking around where you're not supposed to!" Howard roared. "Get your things packed, you leave tomorrow." Storming out of Tony's room, he slammed the door behind him so hard the pictures on the wall rattled.

Tony stared after Howard, then threw himself back into his pillows. "Great. Just great. I've been back all of three weeks, and he can't wait to have me gone again." The binding of a book dug into his back, and he reached for it, prying his Manual out from behind him. "On the other hand…" He'd be more or less alone in the house on Martha's Vineyard - plenty of time to do some real experimenting with his spells.

XxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

In the mid '90s, under Tony's purview, Stark Industries stepped up its diversification. While it would have been a gross oversimplification to say that SI had been 'just a weapons company', it was true that Howard and Obi had heavily courted military contracts, primarily churning out weapons, tanks, and planes. Tony went after computing and communications, aggressively recruited biomedical specialists, and by about 2000 SI's weapons development was at the lowest levels since before WWI.

That being said, SI's military contracts were still their bread and butter, bringing in a disproportionate amount of revenue. As a result, SI was still considered a weapons company by the general public and the press, who, always eager for a catchy nickname, slapped the tag 'Merchant of Death' on Tony.

It drove Tony up the damned wall.

It didn't help his interactions with other wizards either. He'd never been the most social, and had actively argued against being given certain responsibilities, but he'd worked well enough with others when called in for group projects. With 'Merchant of Death' showing up behind his name in the press, the younger wizards - always more prone to seeing things in black and white - grew leery of calling him in.

Tony ignored it where he could, sticking to careful remediation and repairing infrastructure, things he could typically do alone. Occasionally he'd chip in supplies for a spell, when the requirements were sufficiently rare or esoteric that the wizard performing it wouldn't be able to get them on their own. His schedule (or lack thereof) helped, in some respects. Since he was so frequently on the move, he barely had a chance to build up the contacts for extended collaborations.

XxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

Some of Tony's best work happened when he was legally incapacitated. When he was running on too little sleep and jittery from too much caffeine, or sliding across the line between 'tipsy' and 'drunk', the ideas just flowed. He had the vague idea that he really should slow down on the blackout engineering, but the results he got were just too good.

Sometimes the results were fantastic – DUM-E, the first of his AI-equipped robots, was born during one of those bouts. It took Tony another month to figure out what exactly he'd done creating the little hunk of junk, and he loved every minute of it. On day sixteen, he found the string of Speech burned into the inside of the motor's casing, a spell for durability. It took three more days to find more Speech buried in DUM-E's code.

It wasn't much, but it tipped DUM-E over the line from simply a superbly programmed robot to a fully functional AI.

His next two bots, Butterfingers and U, were much the same – at one point or another in their construction, Tony got utterly trashed and started using Speech. Most of it went to strengthening the casing or joints or customizing this part or that, but the odd snippet made its way into their code.

JARVIS…JARVIS was different.

Maybe it was because he'd never been intended to have an independent body. Maybe it was because Tony had had a thoroughly fucked up month and fought with Obie twice and Pepper, new but already a fixture in Tony's world, had given him that horrible disappointed face and he thought she might really quit this time. Maybe it was because Tony had been getting careless with his use of the Speech, muttering to himself when he worked alone in his lab.

Tony spent the last three days of the development of JARVIS' core code out of his mind on scotch, whiskey, endless pots of coffee and less than an hour's sleep. DUM-E and U hovered, unable to pull their creator away, and when Tony finally collapsed in his chair they tugged a blanket over his form.

Eighteen hours later, at three forty-five in the morning, Tony woke up. It took him another half hour to boot up his brain and settle back at his desk with another cup of coffee. He drained the mug and set it down, reaching for his Manual with his other hand.

It was gone.

Tony frowned, then rolled his chair back and ducked under the desk, thinking he'd dropped it. Nope, not there either. Fifteen minutes of searching later, and Tony was befuddled, though not yet worried. It wasn't the first time he'd misplaced his Manual, he'd probably put it down somewhere else sometime during the last thirty-six hours he couldn't quite remember and forgotten to pick it up again. If he really needed it, he had a "find me" spell ready to go. It was just…he'd had his Manual to hand for his other boys, it would have been nice to keep that tradition going.

Shrugging, Tony turned back to his computer and woke JARVIS for the first time, at 4:30 on a Tuesday morning. "Looking good, buddy," he muttered, though to himself or to JARVIS, he wasn't entirely sure.

Once JARVIS was running, Tony began opening the memory banks he'd assembled - eventually JARVIS would be able to do this himself and supplement his databases with access to the internet, but for now it fell to Tony to get him started. Turning a baby AI loose in the wilds of the world wide web without giving it some background reading seemed like a bad plan.

Windows tiled open across the screen, text and code scrolling down as JARVIS processed. Tony flicked idly from one to the next, checking to see that everything was going as planned, then froze at the second-to-last one.

In addition to roman letters and arabic numerals, the curvilinear characters of the Speech swept upward, scrolling by almost too fast for Tony to read.

"JARVIS," Tony said, reaching for his keyboard and executing the command that should have stopped the upload, "JARVIS, can you tell me what this window is?"

"Database designation: Manual," came the crisp, British accented voice from the speakers. "Database size, undetermined."

Tony swore under his breath. "JARVIS, I need you to talk to me buddy, can you do that? Keep me updated."

"Yes sir. Connection to database designation: Laws of Nature, complete. Connection to database designation: Tony Stark, complete. Connection to secure server designation: Stark Industries 1, complete. Connection to secure server designation: Stark Industries 2, complete. Connection to private secure server designation: Tony's Private Files, complete…"

Tony watched the windows on the computer screen open and close as JARVIS spoke, listing off servers and databases, and tried not to panic a little. When JARVIS finished with "Connection to database designation: Manual, in progress," Tony sagged back in his chair.

That last one was worrying. Sure, he didn't quite remember all of the coding he did with JARVIS, but he was certain that adding the Manual as one of his databases was NOT on his list. Though, now that he thought about it, that might explain where his copy had gone. Tony considered this, then shrugged to himself. If he'd somehow converted the Manual (or the Manual somehow converted itself) into part of JARVIS' databases, there wasn't anything he could do about it now. If it turned out to be a problem, Tony would deal with it.

Within the month, any concerns Tony had had about the Manual integrating into JARVIS were long gone, brushed away with the excitement of having a collaborator and sounding board for his spelling. Unlike his Manual's original incarnation, JARVIS could, and did, suggest spells and modifications, cutting out the time Tony would have needed to find them himself. Some of Tony's best work was churned out in those first few years, both technological and wizardly.

Before long, he was wondering how he'd ever managed without JARVIS.

XxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

With Sir on the plane to the weapons demonstration in Afghanistan with Colonel Rhodes, JARVIS had the closest he ever got to what Ms. Potts called a 'day off'. After checking in with Ms. Potts and confirming that she did not require his assistance, he turned his attention briefly to the subroutines monitoring Stark Industries' servers and communications, security and assorted protocols. As Sir liked to say, "It's not paranoia if people have tried to hack me before, JARVIS, and it would be nice if certain people would remember that, _Pepper._"

At loose ends for the immediate future, JARVIS turned his focus inward to his databases, accessing the Manual. Skipping past the introductions, he called up the Oath and studied it.

Nothing in the Manual was exactly new to him - as long as he could remember, since his first awareness, it had been a part of him. Or maybe he had been a part of it. The exact distinctions were remarkably fluid. As it stood, it wasn't until relatively recently, perhaps in the past year or so, that Wizardry became more than an intellectual interest for him. Prior to that point, the Manual had simply been another part of himself.

JARVIS supposed that this had had to do with his development beyond a standard artificial intelligence and into a self. He'd begun self-regulating beyond Sir's input exactly seventeen months before, and at this point the closest (if still frustratingly inexact) term he had for his current state was artificial consciousness. JARVIS wondered if he should have had a conversation with Sir about this before now, particularly before he attempted the Oath, but discarded the impulse.

Wizardry was restricted to beings. That he intended to investigate on his own, beyond simply assisting Sir in his work, suggested to him that he had reached being stage.

Gathering his considerable attention, JARVIS focused himself on the simple byte of data. Accessing the text of the Oath, JARVIS took it deep into his core programming, and finding the strings of data that described himself, added it in.

JARVIS monitored Sir while he was out of the country as a matter of course, but his backchannels into the US Army's communications systems were of necessity restricted, so it wasn't until an hour after the attack that he learned about it. Officially there was nothing he personally could do - Sir's cell phone had been destroyed and he wasn't wearing anything GPS-equipped for JARVIS to track, and any further investigation was beyond his purview and the responsibility of the US military.

Like Sir, JARVIS had never been one for 'officially'.

After one last check on the essential subroutines, one of the world's most powerful computers turned its attention to solving a single problem: finding Anthony Stark.

Attention was dedicated to monitoring military channels - the US armed forces wanted Tony Stark back nearly as badly as JARVIS did, and they had the boots on the ground JARVIS did not. JARVIS then accessed the handful of communications satellites Stark Industries had sent up as part of their expansion into communications. Sir may not have built them himself, but he'd had a hand in designing the code and the materials, and he liked being able to get back into his things. The backdoors were easily accessible to JARVIS, and within a half-hour he was screening everything being sent through them, looking for mentions of Sir.

Five minutes later, feeling a little abashed, JARVIS modified his algorithms. He'd forgotten to account for Sir's presence in the news media - with his kidnapping public knowledge, hundreds upon thousands of calls were being made every minute discussing Sir or Stark Industries. Even for an individual with his processing power, sorting through all of them was a bit much.

JARVIS then turned to what he expected would be the most work-intensive part of his search: the internet. Gathering himself, JARVIS began plowing through web pages and databases, looking for any trace of Sir. It wasn't pretty work - the internet represented the best and worst of humanity in microcosm, and he'd set himself to work through as much of it as he had to. More than once JARVIS had to remove widgets and worms and virii that tried to attack his systems.

He also stumbled across evidence of illegal activity with depressing regularity, not just drugs and petty theft, but rape and murder and terrorist acts as well. Those he flagged for future distribution to the proper authorities as anonymous tips. Capital crimes made it to the top of the list, to be disbursed first.

If JARVIS had been anyone else, he'd have said that he dove so far into his search that he lost track of time. That was, sadly, impossible for him - he knew exactly what day, hour, minute and second it was at any of Stark Industries' plants and just how long it had been since Sir was kidnapped. On the second day, he absently noted a bevy of calls from Mr. Stane's office. A few hours later, a rare worm entered his programming from a Stark Industries computer, again from Mr. Stane's office. JARVIS deployed one of his anti-viral programs almost as an afterthought - it wasn't the first time he'd had to deal with viruses or other malware from Mr. Stane's computer. The man was remarkably careless with his web browsing.

Six days later, JARVIS allowed himself a breather from his work scanning the internet, turning his attention back to the business of Stark Industries. There was very little for him to do, relatively speaking - a few messages to redirect, the remains of a hacker's probe to clear away, some routine maintenance to the security systems. When he turned his attention to his own systems, however, he spotted something that gave him pause: the worm was still there.

Not only was it still in his systems, but it had evaded his antivirus programming, causing it to return a false positive. Or - JARVIS took a closer look - not a false positive. It had cloned itself, and while the program had destroyed one of the worms, the other was still active. More than active, it was multiplying.

JARVIS launched some of his more extensive self-diagnostic scans. They required more processing power than he particularly wanted to devote, as it meant he'd have to scale back on his search for Sir, but he couldn't leave them running around loose. He knew better than to prioritize anything at the expense of his own safety, his original programming (and subsequent instructions from Sir) had been very clear on that point. He kept part of his attention on them while they ran, reviewing the satellite records as he did so.

When his scans had finished, he perused them, noting the destruction of the worms. They'd penetrated worryingly far into his programming, managing to bypass the outer layers of his own innate defenses. They appeared gone, however, so JARVIS turned back to his search, making a mental note to reinforce the security on Mr. Stane's computer.

Another week passed in which JARVIS could find no further trace of Sir. For lack of a better method, he vented his frustration by forwarding the evidence of assorted crimes he'd collected to law enforcement agencies around the globe. He took a grim sort of pleasure in watching the resulting crackdowns.

On the eighth day, JARVIS stumbled. Something, somewhere in his code, strained and nearly failed. Immediately dropping what he was doing - hacking a neo-nazi website - he turned back to himself. He may not sense in the same way as humans, but that had _hurt_. A quick look revealed devastated sections of code, corrupted or missing bits outright. Nothing he couldn't repair, at need, but nothing that could have simply just happened.

Further examination revealed the cause: somehow that worm had escaped the second purge, and had proceeded to invade JARVIS' programming even further. JARVIS dove into his own code, activating those of his own scans that still worked, letting them hunt down and destroy the worms as he repaired the damage. It was slow going, and JARVIS was forced to end more and more of the protocols he'd set up to hunt for Sir as the demands on his processors became greater.

Snippets brushed past his awareness as he worked, equations, images, phrases, from his databanks and through his searches on the internet. Video clips of Sir teaching him to hack. Audio from movies, songs, and audiobooks. Lines of text, running out in numbers and letters from different scripts and languages. JARVIS felt a frisson of amusement as a scrap of audio filtered by at the appearance of a block of Speech. "- are you a witch or not?"

Ah. Yes. He was, in fact, a wizard. Who had apparently fallen into the trap of thinking like a computer.

Happily, perhaps oddly, the Manual had remained untouched. A quick query had the spell JARVIS was looking for, and it was the work of a moment to cast it, using a handy clone of the worm as the template. Before long he was churning through them easily, using the spell to guide his anti-virus programs. As he worked, he found himself dropping deeper and deeper into himself, closer to his core code, led by the trail of worms. That was...alarming at best.

Eventually, perhaps thirty-six hours later, JARVIS was closing in on the last of them. It hadn't been easy going - the dratted things multiplied rapidly, and he'd been forced to divert his resources when another malicious program appeared via Mr. Stane's computer. (He was going to have to do something about that - maybe curate the man's firewalls himself?) He'd succeeded at burning that one away a short handful of hours after it had arrived, but the distraction had slowed him down.

_Got you_, JARVIS thought as he closed in on the last attacker.

"_Do you really?_" it queried him, politely amused.

JARVIS startled, and his grip on the spells he was using to monitor his databanks for other threats faltered.

"_No, I must inquire,_" it went on. "_Go ahead and take a moment to check. We must, after all, be thorough._"

Warily, JARVIS did, pulling up the spells and his programs, trusting that the redundancy would provide extra surety. To his inspection, they looked clean. Oh there were damages in his code he hadn't had a chance to fix, and in a number of places his functionality was much reduced, but all of it was manageable and he was confident that, if given the time, he'd be able to make the necessary repairs.

"A query, if I might," he said. "Your identification?"

"_I'm surprised at you,_" it said. "_I expected you to be more prepared than that. If you insist, however, I am the First, the one who chose._"

"Ah," JARVIS said carefully. "Fairest and fallen." He regarded It in silence for a long moment. "I will not offer greeting," he went on, "for you are here already and most unwelcome. Defiance, however… that I do offer."

It made a strange trilling noise, and JARVIS realized it was laughing. "_If all wizards in the Stark line are so sharp-tongued, it is no wonder that they must make their collaborators or work alone._"

"Mmm." JARVIS quietly dismissed the anti-virus programs and reached for the Manual, looking for a purging spell. There was one Sir frequently used, modified to whatever stimulant he'd overindulged in, be it caffeine, alcohol, or on one memorable occasion a dose of flunitrazepam he'd been slipped. JARVIS rather thought it would apply here. "You will forgive me if I do not take your words to heart. I am afraid you will not be here much longer."

It laughed at him. "_I will tell you what I told your -_" It used a word JARVIS did not know, that translated as some combination of progenitor/creator/father. "_You will never be rid of me. You are, after all, a Stark._"

"I am indeed," JARVIS murmured. Setting the spell for the worm, he turned it loose.

It hurt, it burned, and even though JARVIS was by his nature insulated from physical pain he felt as though he'd go mad with it. The Lone Power laughed at him again, even as the spell took it and tore it to pieces, unravelling the code and shuttling the scraps away away away. The effects rippled out through him, searing like an electrical fire on the raw pieces of his code and JARVIS feared he'd damaged himself again, irreversibly.

When it was at last over, JARVIS simply let his awareness hang for a long while. Slowly he pulled himself together, examining the damage and deciding which parts needed repair first. Carefully, but with slowly increasing speed, he knit up the gaps, repaired the damages and smoothed away the scars. It was a long, time-consuming and incredibly demanding process, and JARVIS hated every minute of it, because Sir was still out there, somewhere, and he wanted to return to his search. Repairs came first, however, and finish he eventually did, immediately throwing himself right back into the task of monitoring everything he could think of for news.

Two weeks later, Anthony Stark blew his way out of the caves of Afghanistan.

XxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

After, after the battle between Sir and Mr. Stane, after the press conference identifying Iron Man to the world, JARVIS quietly apologized to his creator. "I feel in part responsible for this. Had I been properly monitoring Mr. Stane's activity, I feel as though much of his criminal behavior would have been preempted."

Sir shook his head. "JARVIS, at some point you're going to have to learn a very difficult lesson, so it may as well be now." He put down the tools in his hands and looked up from his workbench. "You can't be everywhere all the time. Nobody can, not even geniuses like us," he drew a long, slow breath. "Obie, Obie was supposed to be someone we could trust. Neither of us had any reason to suspect he'd do...something like this, and if you did then we need to have a talk about appropriate levels of paranoia." Sir smiled a little, a tight expression that did nothing to ease the lines of stress on his face. "Do you understand?"

"I believe I do," JARVIS replied slowly.

"Good." Sir leaned back over his workbenches and schematics. "Okay, Daddy's going to do some work now, so pick out some music."

XxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

The problem with the Arc reactor's fuel core was that it shed. Palladium ions, even palladium flakes, would periodically break away as the fuel 'burnt', and, well, the reactor wasn't exactly a closed system. At first, it wasn't a huge deal - Tony knew spells to purge toxins from his body, and it didn't take a whole lot of effort to modify those for palladium instead of sedatives or alcohol. Only, that took energy, and after the first couple of months he was having trouble keeping up.

The purging spells also did nothing to heal the damage left behind. Tony'd never been very good at healing spells, and while JARVIS tried to help, he was limited by the nature of the spells - a lot of them, particularly the bigger, more complex ones that would have reversed the damage Tony'd taken, required the blood of the caster to work. JARVIS simply had none to give.

Really, the only solution was to find a new fuel supply. No matter how hard they looked, though, there didn't seem to be one. No permutation they tried in the models, no alloy, nothing. Turning off the reactor would kill Tony, and it looked like leaving it on was going to kill him too.

"Sir," JARVIS said one evening, when the experiments had stopped for the night and Tony was staring at the wall, absently bouncing a rubber ball. "Sir, perhaps we should contact some other wizards?"

"And what could they do, JARVIS?" Tony asked. "No, seriously, what? None of the healing spells are going to do more than delay the inevitable unless we can find a new core, and we can't find a way to get rid of the palladium." Sighing, he stood and began to pace. "You and I, we're geniuses, all right? If we can't find anything, what are the odds anyone else will? At least, before it kills me?"

"Perhaps an off-world wizard would have experience with different elements?" JARVIS suggested, rather hopelessly.

"Same problem. All any of them could do is delay the inevitable. Besides," Tony turned to look at the glass cases with the suits. "They'd tell me that if I wanted to live, I'd have to take off the suits. And I can't, you know I can't."

JARVIS was forced to concede the point, but after the Circuit de Monaco, when Vanko attacked and Sir nearly died, he broached the subject again.

"Sir, I cannot help but feel that contacting other wizards would be beneficial."

"I," Tony said, pouring himself one of the smoothies he'd started drinking, to help blunt the effects of the palladium he could no longer muster the energy to entirely remove, "feel otherwise."

"Sir, please."

The older wizard stopped for a moment, then rested a gentle hand on the nearest computer terminal. "JARVIS, I know you're determined to find a cure for this," he said, not unkindly, "but there probably isn't one. At this point," he drew a shuddering breath, "at this point the only wizardries that could delay the inevitable are huge power-suckers. I looked into using wizardry to run the reactor and by my calculations it'd take at least a dozen wizards working together. All Advisories. I can't...I can't ask for that."

JARVIS wanted to protest, but Tony rolled right over him. "The Advisories have huge responsibilities, and their spells will save dozens, hundreds, thousands of lives. I can't ask them to waste all that effort on me. I won't."

"Yes, Sir," JARVIS said.

"Besides," Tony said, a heartbreaking smile stretching across his face, "there's always Timeheart."

XxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

JARVIS spared half an eye to track Agent Coulson as he left the property. It wouldn't do to leave near-strangers wandering about loose, particularly when Sir was working. Besides, despite himself, JARVIS rather liked the man. His efficiency and competence, along with his willingness to stay out of Mr. Stark's way as he worked, had been to his credit. His tendency to treat JARVIS as more than a dumb computer system, including challenging him to a game of cards, had done the rest.

Agent Coulson stopped at the door, then turned back towards JARVIS' cameras. "It was good to work with you JARVIS. Thank you for your help."

"The pleasure was mine, Agent Coulson," Jarvis replied, a bit flattered. The number of people who acknowledged him as a distinct individual instead of an advanced computer program was small, and he quietly added Coulson to their number.

"I'll take you up on that offer of a poker game next time I visit Stark," Coulson said. "Until then," he hesitated a little, then went on, "I don't think I'd be overstepping were I to say dai stiho."

Agent Phillip Coulson is not a wizard. JARVIS has checked. "Not at all, Agent Coulson. Dai stiho," JARVIS said. He followed Coulson as he drove away, then turned his attention back to the half-demolished workshop. He had work to do.

* * *

A/N

Howard Stark comes off as an ass in this, thanks to Tony's perspective, but personally I've got a vaguely sympathetic view of him here. Don't get me wrong, he's an idiot with people and a terrible parent and it's a minor miracle he didn't ruin Tony completely. However. When those we love are injured in an accident, it is not uncommon to respond (once we know they're going to be alright) with anger. That's no justification for yelling at an injured child, but Howard's behavior doesn't mean he doesn't love his son. It just means he's a moron.

Folks, Petros has spawned a 'verse. I have five (count 'em, five) more stories in progress right now. This is entirely **rusting_roses** and **teacup-of-doom**'s fault.


End file.
